Algorithms for Data Migration



The performance of modern day large-scale storage systems (such as disk farms) depends critically on having an assignment of data to storage devices that balances the load across the devices or that optimizes a more complex cost function. Unfortunately, the optimal data layout is likely to change over time because of workload changes, device additions, or device failures. Thus, it is common to periodically compute a new assignment of data to devices [3, 5–7, 22], either at regular intervals or on demand as system changes occur. Once the new assignment is computed, the data must be migrated from the old configuration to the new configuration. This migration must be done as efficiently as possible to minimize the impact of the migration on the system. The large size of the data objects (gigabytes are common) and the large amount of total data (can be petabytes) makes migration a process which can easily take several days. In this paper, we consider the problem of finding an efficient migration plan. We focus solely on the off-line migration problem, i.e., we ignore the load imposed by user requests for data objects during the migration. Our motivation for studying this problem lies in migrating data for large-scale storage system management tools such as Hippodrome . Hippodrome automatically adapts to changing demands on a storage system without human intervention. It analyzes a running workload of requests to data objects, calculates a new load-balancing configuration of the objects and then migrates the objects. An offline migration can be performed as a background process or at a time when loads from user requests are low (e.g. over the weekend). The input to our migration problem is an initial and final configuration of data objects on devices, and a description of the storage system such as the storage capacity of each device, and the underlying network connecting the devices. Our goal is to find a migration plan that uses the existing network connections between storage devices to move the data from the initial configuration to the final configuration in the minimum amount of time. For obvious reasons, we require that all intermediate configurations in the plan be valid: they must obey the space constraints of the storage devices as well as usability requirements of the on-line system. (The migrationAlgorithmica process can be stopped at any time and the on-line system should still be able to run and maintain full functionality.) The time it takes to perform a migration is a function of the sizes of the objects being transferred, the network link speeds and the degree of parallelism in the plan. A crucial constraint on the legal parallelism in any plan is that each storage device can be involved in the transfer (either sending or receiving, but not both) of only one object at a time. Most variants one can imagine on this problem are NP-complete. The migration problem for networks of arbitrary topology is NP-complete even if all objects are the same size and each device has only one object that must be moved off of it. The problem is also NP-complete when there are just two storage devices connected by a link, if the objects are of arbitrary sizes.

We will always make the following assumptions.
1. The data objects are all the same size;
2. There is at least one free space on each storage device in both the initial and final
configurations of the data;
3. There is a direct bidirectional link between each pair of devices and each link has
the same bandwidth; and
4. Every device has the same read and write speed

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